


If I Say Goodnight

by rogueshadows



Category: The Night Of
Genre: Character Study, Extended Scene, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 14:44:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rogueshadows/pseuds/rogueshadows
Summary: The Night Of, Episode 6. Inner monologue for the phone call with Chandra.





	If I Say Goodnight

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this a while ago during a rewatch and decided to share it...upon rewatching again. Unbeta'd.

Naz turns over the cell phone in his hand, curling and uncurling his fingers as he tries to decide if calling her will make him feel any less alone. He shouldn't, he knows the lines from the way his first lawyer had drawn them. The forbidden feeling adds something else, the thrill he's been chasing in the drugs suddenly caught in his chest.

In hours of boredom and camouflaging himself into Freddy's gang nothing else has felt so close to freedom. He dials the personal number she'd given, that he'd programmed in that first day Freddy handed over the phone. Chandra picks up after only a few rings.

At the sound of her voice, Naz feels nervous somehow, a brief glimpse at his old self that makes him feel exposed for an instant. It’s a reminder, of what he is and is not. She strips through his facade with a genuine concern that shouldn’t feel so foreign. It’s so unlike what he’s been hearing, the cloying way Freddy angles to use him, the way he just lets it happen. 

At the same time, she’s so professional he could laugh, her careful words down the line a reprieve from the blank stone walls closing him in. 

Naz plays it off, calls the rest of those around him animals, despite the constant wonder if he’s just the same. No matter what she believes of his innocence, she’s not blind. She’s seen him change into something sharp and there’s no way to go back. 

At least her hesitance isn’t the same as the fear in his mother’s voice, his father’s trust, his brother’s distance from everything that has happened. Without the weight of his entire life as a build up to this she’s more honest, even in briefest exchange. She’s a kindness he may not deserve, but as he’s learning in prison; you take what you must to survive.

He thinks of her sitting and watching him in the courtroom, of her unwavering ethic, how she’s using her delicate intelligence just to try and puzzle him free of the cage he’s caught himself in. Trusting her is a sin he will gladly repeat if it can make him feel any less like a monster. He tries to see beyond this all and wishes she could too, overcome with the rawness of sheer want for the things he cannot have. Certain actions that he can’t rewind no matter how hard he shuts his eyes.

He pictures her kind doe eyes the day he’d given up the plea deal and wonders if she will be his undoing too, if he’ll die a stranger in a strange land because she’d made him believe for a moment that she could save him. He wonders if it was curiosity that made her tell the truth, just an honest question of whether or not he’d done it that had him condemned. 

Does Chandra see a future for him now? Or should he have trusted the one John had spelled out, accepted the assumption of guilt and the freedom it promised. A guarantee that came with too many complications. Pride, fear for his family, the fact that deep in his heart he couldn’t lie, literally, to save his life.

Even if absolved of the blood, framed in images on his hands, his life has been cleaved in two. Before and after he went and fucked everything up. For the sake of a girl who he hardly knew. The Naz that poor Andrea met is just as dead as she is. His gut churns each times he lets that realization in, the image of her in his mind through fog as she leaned in to kiss him intercut with flashes of the blood on her sheets and shoulders. He feels sorry for her, he hates her, he wishes he’d liked her less. He wishes she’d lived and laughed him out the door for how earnestly he’d trusted her. 

Chandra isn’t like her in the slightest and yet he can see the splintering facts of them in his mind, the way they’re tied together by his foolish want. Chandra warns him away, softly, but still he can’t help but feel she understands, that she can’t help but see him the same way he sees her. As much as anyone does. Out of respect, he takes the hint for what it is.

“I hope it doesn’t scare you if I say goodnight,” he says, fearing himself enough for both their sakes. There’s a pause, he can hear her breathing and the quiet shared is almost a kindness in itself, knowing that he’s not the only one who doesn’t know what to do.

“Goodnight.”


End file.
